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Legal News Archive For
March, 2010

Earlier this week, an eleventh-hour stay of execution was granted by the Supreme Court in the case of Henry “Hank” Skinner. The court will now address the question of Skinner's appeal, which asks for the DNA testing that he claims will exonerate him.
Skinner heard the news while he was eatin...

The grandson of Golden Flake snack chip founder Leo E. Bashinsky has been found dead, and a note taped inside his abandoned vehicle provides no answers as to the cause of his death.
Major Bashinsky, 65, disappeared in early March. His Toyota Camry was found near downtown Birmingham, AL by his ad...

Two weapons—one used in a shooting at the Pentagon earlier this month, and another used in a courthouse shooting in Las Vegas—have been traced back to the police department in Memphis, Tennessee.
According to law enforcement officials who spoke to the Associated Press, the guns were once sei...

Riverside, California's Hemet Gang Task Force has offered up a $200,000 reward for information about a series of booby traps intended to kill its police officer members.
The first incident that drew attention was on December 31, 2009, when someone redirected the natural gas line at the task forc...

A man who took part in a decades-old airplane hijacking, and who has been living as a fugitive in Cuba ever since, has returned to the United States to plead guilty in the matter.
Luis Armando Pena Soltren is a U.S. resident who was indicted in December 1968 on charges related to the skyjacking ...

A former doctor who sought to escape his marriage by poisoning his wife with a cyanide-laced calcium pill was sentenced recently to life in prison.
After a lurid six-weel trial, in which over 60 witnesses testified to Yazeed Essa's habitual philandering, a jury found the 41-year-old Ohio man gui...

A federal appeals court has upheld the conviction of James Ford Seale, a suspected former KKK member who abducted and killed two black teenagers over four decades ago.
The cold case dates back to 1964, when Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, both 19, were kidnapped in a rural area near ...

Los Angeles—Last December, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge set bail for Stephanie Lazarus at $10 million. Now her brother, Steven Lazarus, has broken the family's months-long silence by calling this amount “way unreasonable” and claiming that his sister is not receiving the proper c...

According to federal authorities, a trendy sushi restaurant in Santa Monica has been serving its customers whale and horse meat. After being exposed by the filmmakers of an Oscar-winning documentary, the restaurant's parent company and one of its chefs will face charges.
Two women involved with ...

Police are asking for help in identifying the subjects of photographs which were found stashed in a storage unit used by the so-called “Dating Game Killer.”
Rodney Alcala, 66, was convicted last month of murdering one young girl and four women between 1977 and 1979. He appeared on the televi...

A United States Bankruptcy Court Judge, Burton Lifland, has upheld an earlier ruling that says investors who were swindled by Ponzi-scheme perpetrator Bernard Madoff can claim only their initial investment, minus any withdrawals they made.
Trustee Irving Picard is the man charged with overseeing...

A judge in Tennessee has granted asylum to a German family that came to the United States in order to homeschool their children.
In his decision, Lawrence O. Burman, a federal immigration judge, said that the family in question would face persecution were they to return to their home country—n...

Four men have been indicted in a lucrative online ticket-hacking scheme, in which they were able to obtain tickets to popular concerts, shows and sporting events and resell them at a significant profit.
The employees of Wiseguys Tickets Inc. are alleged to have hacked into the computer systems o...

Native Chinese Muslims who had asked to be released from Guantanamo Bay into the United States will not get their wish, says the Supreme Court.
A string of appeals has made this case a tangled one. Then men, all of whom are Uyghurs—an ethnic minority from western China—have been cleared for ...

Baltimore—Authorities at a Baltimore prison mistakenly set the wrong man free last week, and several people have been charged in the caper.
Raymond Taylor, 26, was posing as William Johnson, another inmate at the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center. Taylor was serving a life sentence for a...

Fresno, CA—A private security guard with an extensive collection of weapons killed a Fresno County deputy sheriff and wounded two other men before taking his own life.
Authorities began investigating Rick “Ricky” Ray Liles, 51, after receiving reports that shots had been fired in the small...

A convicted murder who bragged about his crimes will not be granted a hearing, the Supreme Court has ruled.
The justices rejected the appeal of Paul Warner Powell, a man who sits on Virginia's death row, after having delayed his execution last July in order to debate the claims he made about dou...

New Orleans—A former lieutenant of the New Orleans Police Department, who is charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice, has entered a guilty plea. He is alleged of having helped cover up fellow officers' fatal shootings of two unarmed people during the chaotic period following Hurricane Katrina...

A convicted murderer who has lived in solitary confinement for almost three decades is awaiting trial to determine whether his living conditions constitute “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Tommy Silverstein—nicknamed “Terrible Tommy”--has been isolated since 1983 from the general popula...

A man in the witness protection program will not be appointed a guardian to assist in the payment of a judgment, ruled a federal appeals court.
The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard the case of Michael Townley, an American citizen who worked with the Chilean intelligence service during the re...

The recent recalls by auto industry giant Toyota, in which over two million vehicles have been recalled due to concerns with malfunctioning accelerator pedals, may be forcing the courts to reconsider just where the fault lies in some auto accident cases.
Take, for example, the case of Koua Fong ...

Chicago, IL—A man who was wrongly imprisoned for a quarter of a century has been awarded a settlement by the city of Chicago, just days before a trial was scheduled to begin.
Jerry Miller, who was convicted of raping a woman in a parking garage in 1981, was released from prison in 2006, and pard...

Miami, FL—Bidders on the popular Internet site eBay, working together with postal inspectors and other authorities, have helped bring down one of the auction site's biggest scammers.
A Brazilian businessman whose legal name is Nilton Rossoni, but who had multiple aliases, including “Jorge C...

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